Though some practitioners are expressing ‘consultation fatigue’ (following the Creative Scotland Film Sector review (which I chaired) and subsequent consultation on its Film Strategy 2014-17, the Scottish Parliament Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee’s enquiry “to consider how Scotland can grow sustainable TV and film and video games industries” it is an important opportunity to set out the potential for growth as well as the obstacles facing our screen practitioners and businesses and encourage Parliament to press the Scottish Government to seriously up its support for the sector if it really wants to see the culture, economic and social benefits from the moving image that other European countries have achieved through concerted action. My tuppence worth is available along with the other eighteen [since posting the number has risen to 40] written evidence submissions (though one of them seems to have wandered in by mistake!) here. The committee will be taking further evidence from a variety of practitioners and agencies during January starting with Games on the 14th, TV and film on the 21st, public agencies on the 28th and Fiona Hyslop, the Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Europe and External Affairs on the 4th of February. Given the concern for the economic impact of the creative industries it is curious that the Committee, so far at least, doesn’t plan to take evidence from the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Sustainable Growth, John Swinney. He’s the person who really holds the key to investment in the sector…having read and heard the evidence from all the above perhaps the committee will then have some questions for him.

UPDATE 4/2/15 in recent days John Swinney’s name has appeared on the agenda alongside Fiona Hyslop to appear in front of the committee today which suggests that the committee members/those giving evidence have successfully upped the ante..

Last night, on the eve of the TV industry’s annual migration to Edinburgh from London (where notwithstanding the BBC’s efforts to shift production into the nations and regions, most of it remains domiciled) a vision of televisual growth and opportunity was unveiled by Tern TV’s David Strachan in the august surroundings of the National Library of Scotland. “Growing the Television Broadcast and Production Sector in Scotland” is the much anticipated report of the working group set up in the wake of the Scottish Broadcasting Commission, which published its closely argued and impassioned final report (‘Platform for Success’) back in September 2008 to be followed by Scottish Enterprise’s rather more prosaic contribution “Building the ‘Platform for Success’” in March 2009.

In a nutshell the report argues that television in Scotland is looking at a three-year window of opportunity to achieve 60% growth in commissions and employment. That would see turnover grow from £215m to £346m and employment from just under 3,000 to the full –time equivalent of over four and half thousand jobs. However as the report notes:

“This will only happen with collective and coordinated action across broadcasters, independent production companies and the public sector”.

While the major driver of this anticipated growth is the BBC’s commitment to increase network production in Scotland to account for 9% of its spend, an increase of £50m a year by 2016, the report also expects higher levels of commissioning by Channel 4 and, in the longer term, other broadcasters to be part of the mix.

But there are significant barriers to achieving this step change and, as in the film sector, a key one is the question of scale and diversity of companies. Skills gaps are another barrier, the Catch 22 of growing network production in genres that Scottish companies have historically not been adept at is that you can only become adept at developing and producing entertainment or drama if you have had commissions that allow you to grow that expertise! Lacking a domestic market of sufficient scale to give companies both the business base and the range of genre expertise that can migrate to network, the danger is that increased demand from network commissioners will be met by local branches of London companies importing talent and skills ‘known’ to network commissioners. This is nothing new – it’s been the central issue facing indies and broadcasters in Scotland since 1982 and the creation of Channel 4.

The solution to this market failure? Coordinated action (which includes significant public investment) to address the questions of scale, sustainability and skills that can get Scotland’s producers – indie and in-house BBC/STV – into the premier league across the full breadth of programme genres.

Who will deliver this? The report suggests Creative Scotland should take the lead, building on the model of the Creative Industries Partnership Reference Group, but calls more broadly on the ‘public sector’ to provide up to £10m a year (though some of that might come from the BBC and Channel 4) through various mechanisms ranging from Seed Equity Finance of £50k to new start-up companies through to Production Incentive Finance of up to £500k a shot to support ‘productions of scale’. The report suggests that the latter investment could itself lever an additional £12m a year securing or creating around 240 jobs a year.

How will it be paid for? According to insiders one of the reasons the report has taken so long to hit the streets has been Scottish Enterprise’s seeming reluctance to sign up to hard figures on the necessary pump-priming investment – presumably for fear that the larger portion of it might have to come from its budget with no guarantee of the Government chipping in, particularly in the current climate.

So it boils down to whether the potential return of an extra £130m to the Scottish economy, 1700 jobs a year and a step change in Scottish broadcasting and production with significant wider cultural and economic benefits (e.g. to the ‘creative supply chain’ of writers, directors, designers, actors, facilities and technology companies etc.) is worth the risk of around £10m a year in investment – around a third of the cost of the proposed new Forth Bridge or what the Government currently spends on supporting air services to the further reaches of the country.

Assuming around half of the necessary investment – say £5m – were to come from Scottish enterprise that would be just over 2% of its annual investment budget. On its own figures the current Gross Value Added (GVA) of the sector is £153m a year. Taking the mid-point between its worst case and best case scenarios gives an additional £76m a year GVA, even if the return were only £50m that would still be a ten-fold return on investment. In opportunity-cost terms that seems like a pretty competitive proposition and arguably at a considerably lower risk than in many (most?) other sectors.

In the first of an occasional Friday series on the language of policy we take a look at when and how ‘creative economy’ entered the lexicon of policy wonks, politicians, academics and the chattering classes (apologies if you feel you don’t belong to any of the foregoing!).

Many people think John Howkins coined the term with his 2001 book The Creative Economy but in fact it was in use considerably earlier than that. Ten years earlier in The Times (April 13th 1991) Neil Kinnock was reported as indicating “Labour was proposing a move towards a ”learning society”, the only sure foundation of a creative economy. Labour’s technology trusts would bring together universities, industrialists and financial institutions. They would try to commercialize ideas developed in universities and by other public bodies, giving inventions a real chance of being manufactured in Britain.”

The following year, 1992, Chinese Central committee member Yang Jike opined that: “the combination of science and technology with creative power results in a creative economy and a restructured economy; and the combination of science and technology with information results in an information economy and a policy-making economy” ( Xinhua news agency domestic service 7 Nov 1992)

A year later neighbouring Japan was looking forward to the Creative Economy in a Government sponsored report calling for “Formation of a Domestic-Demand-Led Economy and a Sophisticated, Creative Economy” as one of five core principles for economic reform. (The Daily Yomiuri, December 18, 1993)

Closer to home in 1995 an Irish Times opinion piece calling on the Irish Government to end subsidy of Temple Bar area (now somewhat synonymous with stag and hen parties but intended to be a dynamic cultural quarter) suggested: “The rest of the creative economy upon which the expensive edifice of government rests will have to fork out to pay for the tax-holiday of those in Temple Bar. There’s no such thing as a free lunch no such thing as a free tax-break. Somebody will always pay the revenue missing.”

Things really hotted up (in the UK) with Labour’s 1997 election and in a critique of the Arts Council of Great Britain (and in terms familiar to us from the debate over the establishment of Creative Scotland) the Guardian’s Johnathan Glancey observed: “For [Culture Minister Chris] Smith and New Labour it [the Arts Council] represents a top-down approach to the arts that seems not only out of step with Government thinking, but a long way removed from the way that the ‘creative economy’ works in 1997. It does seem remarkable that full-time career bureaucrats, based largely in London, have the power to channel funds to one artist or group of artists and away from another. The paperwork, committees, in-fighting and jostling for position involved seem utterly divorced from the artistic process. Far better to be funded or commissioned by a maverick private patron, perhaps, than by committees. Great art is not the product of consensus, but of confidence, risk-taking and even recklessness.”

Smith gave a speech on the Creative Economy at that Autumn’s Labour conference (though ‘Cool Britannia’ was the tabloid’s preferred term) and Tony Blair used the pages of the Mirror to say “Government can help build a creative economy fit to take on the world in the new Millennium.” (3/10/1997)

Back on home turf (and eerily presaging Andrew Dixon’s recent tour) in 1999 ‘ART CHIEFS HIT THE ROAD WITH MISSION TO LISTEN’ was the headline in The Scotsman (August 11th) reporting the launch of the national consultation on cultural strategy that has led, via many twists and turns, to where we are today, mere months away from the formal launch of the agency charged with making Scotland’s creative economy both bigger and better. Eleven years back “The value of the arts to Scotland’s economy is also stressed in the consultation document, Celebrating Scotland. The “creative economy” has been estimated by Scottish Enterprise as generating GBP 5.3 billion a year and sustaining 91,000 jobs.”

Always ahead of the curve (and keen to work football into any discussion) Channel 4 nations and regions chief Stuart Cosgrove (rightly) berated the meeja/policy wonk’s determined focus on the issue of ‘a Scottish Six’ (O’clock news)’ as a distraction from wider issues:

“This month, Scotland’s two biggest clubs, Rangers and Celtic, will commission more media work than most broadcasters. They are vital to Scotland’s creative economies – building websites, driving e-commerce, pioneering live beam-back television, planning pay-per-view channels and commissioning sell-through videos for the Christmas market.” (‘So who do you think controls the future of Scottish broadcasting?’ Scotsman 3/12/99)

As we entered the 2st century the term really took hold of our politicians’ imaginations:

“Scotland’s creative industries, already worth £5 billion every year, are to receive £25 million worth of investment as part of a new strategy, MSPs heard yesterday. The pledge was made by Nicol Stephen, deputy minister for enterprise, speaking during a debate on the creative economy. Mr Stephen said that the executive wanted to see the sector grow, year on year, by 10 per cent. Acknowledging that the sector was both “wide” and “diverse”, Mr Stephen explained that it encompassed industries as wide ranging as architecture, computer games and advertising.” (The Scotsman, 28/9/00) By this point the number of people employed in the sector was miraculously back up to 100,000 (unlikely) – or he was using a different definition (likely).

Not everyone in Scotland at the turn of the millenium was so enamoured of the Creative Economy though.

“The debate on the “creative economy” is typical of this Government’s flatulent filibustering when it has nothing new to say but needs to deny debating time for more important issues like the SQA shambles. I ask Rhona Brankin if the Government will invest scarce public funds in a so-called film studio at Glasgow’s Pacific Quay when developers are already willing to make a huge private investment for a film studio of international scale elsewhere in Scotland. A polite body swerve is her response.” (Brian Montieth. MSP’s Parlimaemtary diary in the Herald 9/10/2000)

So the term ‘Creative Economy’ has been in fairly widespread use for the best part of twenty years and it seems we still dont know for sure just how big it is or how many people work in it and therefore how fast it is growing. Another argument (if any were needed) for someone (Creative Scotland?) to knock heads together to establish a data collection, research and analysis unit fit for the creative economy of this century rather than the nineteenth.

Reading the debate that finally ushered into being Creative Scotland is only marginally more entertaining than watching paint dry, if only because its possible to skip the most tedious parts to get to the slightly less tedious. One can’t help wondering who nobbled the tories to try and secure an ammendment to the Bill to give CS the title “lead body” which, if you believe its opponents, would have set it above the national companies, Museums Scotland etc. Pauline McNeill (Glasgow Kelvin) (Lab) bemoaned the non-transfer of Scottish Enterprise’s creative industries budget (something SE bods like to deny exists) to the new body and the potential loss of the Scottish Screen brand so doggedly built over the past decade. Culture minister Fiona Hyslop didn’t comment on the SE issue but she did hold open the prospect of the Scottish Screen scottie dog continuing to wag its tail if Andrew Dixon and his soon to be appointed board feel so inclined:

” I say to Pauline McNeill that the use of the Scottish Screen brand will be an operational matter for creative Scotland, and I will pass on her remarks to the body.”

So good news for the (‘when we thought we might lose it we realised how much we loved it’) film-making community not to mention dog lovers. Speaking of the latter Scottish Terrier lovers can get a further film-related fix with an account of how a Coraline Animator got 200 Scottie dogs doing their thing.

Like the Tardis a surprising amount of filmmaking went on in Wales last year considering its size (population 2.9 million not including Time Lords). Reviewing the production statistics for 2009 (as reported in the now defunct Screen Finance) the standout fact is that compared to Scottish Screen’s investment in one majority-UK feature (Peter Mullan’s Neds), one equal UK/international co-production (Outcast, produced by Eddie Dick of Makar) and one minority UK co-production (David Mackenzie’s The Last Word, a Zentrop/Sigma co-pro), the Welsh had money in five films, all of which were majority UK productions. This may reflect the fact that Welsh filmmakers have two local pots of money to approach (the Film Agency for Wales’ £1m investment fund and the £10 million Wales Creative IP Fund) plus of course (like Scots) access to UK Film Council funding as well (although interestingly the UKFC were involved in only one of the five features). The result of this surge in locally financed production was over £25m of production compared to Scotland’s locally supported £11m. Having built up a healthy indigenous production capacity and facilities infrastructure thanks to the ringfencing provided by S4C, the boost provided by substantial BBC investment, spearheaded by the relocation of Dr Who, and the enlightened enterprise agency approach to the creative industries, the Welsh seem to be forging ahead while Scotland’s film and TV drama production remains in the doldrums, some way from achieving critical mass. Sadly the fudge that is the Creative Scotland Framework Agreement and the continuing myopia of Scottish Enterprise when it comes to the creative content that supplies their beloved digital markets doesn’t raise one’s hopes that we will be able to match the joined-up Welsh advance any time soon. But I truly hope I’m wrong about that.

SUBSCRIBE HERE

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.